High school student discovers 1.5M potential new astronomical objects
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The interview is funny: when the winner was asked how he did it: I took that NASA database, and made the computer think...
No more concrete. Oh yes they said AI and infrared, he even used infrared.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak
Here's a blog post of his talking about Matteo among other things:
* https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
As in, not validated?
How do we know this algorithm is any good?
So, uh… yeah. That's it. A guy was chosen by the jury as the winner of highschool-talent competition and won $250K. Good for him.
The 3rd place is a proof for some Ramsey-like problem it seems, though.
- the lab PI has a friend who’s kid needs to put together a college application
- PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid.
- kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
(Also: "Kid outsmarts stuffy professionals" is an evergreen journalistic subject, and don't dismiss the political angle of sowing distrust in "establishment" scientists in favor of a younger person using AI)
Not that young people can't do big things but it's probably got less rigor than a graduate-level project.
Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool idea and it sounds like he did a great job. I don't want to be unjustly dismissive. These stories come up all the time and they usually don't amount to a whole lot- like most research.
- postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant put on their CV
- the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about what working in science is like and they will be disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-high expectations placed on them
- depending on the how the press frames it, the public either gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for clicks.
Looks like he went to Pasadena High School though. When I did a bit of aerospace research at Caltech in high school all I did was cold email professors so any kid around here with some initiative and smarts can get connected.
[0] https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
Good euphemism for wealthy parents
Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer (NBER)
This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation, which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17286/w172...
Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think they should in fact focus on the science and not the person behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover too.
The article says that The Astronomical Journal did just that: talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the author. I think I prefer that.
Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize, you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
The one thing that suggests this might be legit is that Pasadena has an elite Math High School. https://www.mathacademy.us/
If a college senior could pull it off, perhaps a properly educated high school junior could too.
To make high school-level competitions more fair, we should likely prioritize access to researchers for all smart, hard-working high schoolers rather than only those who are nearby a university or have wealthy parents.
There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.
I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from similar giants.
I was an undergrad, not in high school, but I basically designed and ran a project that led to a major publication that a useless postdoc who was foisted onto the lab leader for political reasons took credit for an "kindly" gave me last author on.
Later, when I was in my own PhD, my adviser wouldn't let me continue MY OWN RESEARCH because it might "look like" I was stealing his work, so I had to invent a different thesis topic.
The above was in CS, this is more STEM BTW -- it's perfectly possible to develop a new computational technique to "discover" 1.5m new interesting things in an existing data set -- it's impressive, but it's not on par with say, a botanist cataloging 1.5 million new flowers.
Like many professors behaving badly, you'd think they'd get exposed and corrected. But grad students and postdocs (in a position to know what's going on) don't want to throw away their careers. They need the recommendations, they need to not be seen as damaged goods from a bad advisor, and they need to not have sketchy university administrators getting rid of the messenger. And if admin assistants notice, they probably need the job, especially if their kid is getting a tuition deal because the parent works at the university. To a bad professor, the environment is like a heartless business, only less accountable.
When a friend was telling me about this brand new grad student, who'd be working with professor X, I said "Oh, no..." and that X was bad to students (which I knew from one of their students). Friend, who was from a prominent academic lineage, immediately responded crossly, that I shouldn't say such things, hurting people's reputations. Soon after, friend came back and apologized, that I had been right, and the student realized their terrible career move, getting that advisor. Friend later connected some prospective student to me, to warn them about a different bad (worse) professor in the whisper network.
But universities have terrible institutional memories, with students always leaving. So a bad professor tends to persist.
Though, occasionally, you'll hear of a bad professor from the whisper network leaving their job, without explanation. So presumably a wronged student or staff finally sued.
e.g. let's take a corporate example:
- New software is written to solve a problem
- It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a problem
- An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention for two months.
- Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such great work
Who should the credit for this? The person who originally solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?
At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired. Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.
(This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about the above...)
this example isn't a great example for the academic situation given the way "getting credit" works and how important it is in academia. getting credit for your work in academia isn't just about ego, it's the currency you use to get and keep your job.
imagine if in software land you had to periodically assemble a list of your lifetime accomplishments and you were getting stack-ranked against every other dev in existence. if your list is found lacking, you have to leave software engineering for a different career.
when work gets moved from a postdoc or gradstudent to serve as a vanity project for a connected high-schooler (i'm not saying that that's what happened in this case, but it is something that happens), you're hurting an early-career scientist that is actively contributing to the field in order to support a kid that "maybe someday" will start to contribute to the field.
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist.
With a claim like this, I’d be looking for interviews or online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that lend a lot of weight to the claim.
Evidence for this claim?
> For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
As opposed to you, who's up and down the thread making unsubstantiated claims and engaging in emotional manipulation to try to discredit (without evidence, I might add) the idea that there's any cheating or subversion going on whatsoever.
The people you're responding to are making far better points than you are.
This is the standard for getting into an elite school. Just getting good grades and generic "activities" hasn't cut it for twenty years or more.
They live in a completely different world from the rest of us and they hate us for it.
Is there evidence?
It seems obvious that parents can increase or decrease the odds of someone starting a career in an "elite" field requiring advanced education like "Science", but I interpret your comment as suggesting that most scientists got their job by means of daddy donating to a university or some other silly fantasy.
No evidence, I'm obviously lying ...
Btw, nepo is broader than "my dad donated". Most (all?) worthy positions in academia depend more on who you're friends with than on talent just by itself.
But that really has nothing to do with the original gripe about "day zero", which would generally mean getting into a masters or phd program, or perhaps an undergrad research project, where grades and standardized test scores get someone in the door -- social skills sufficient to hold a brief conversation about a science topic would be a nice bonus, but not really necessary.
And I confirm my previous statement, the immense majority of people who go on to take senior positions, particularly at big institutions, are made from day zero.
People who manage to make a career in science usually follow a specific educational path that includes a phd and postdoctoral research. No one would claim it is completely fair because there are many things that can block or hide that path (family situation; life events; lack of encouragement from teachers; being born in the wrong country; etc.). However, the system does not otherwise care about your background in any meaningful way.
You should consider the dark implications that you may be pushing misinformation that could discourage people who are gifted or intellectually curious and motivated from trying to improve the world by doing science.
But if you are making consequential decisions (like admission or hiring) based on a metric or signal that's been gamed to death, then you have to be a realist.
That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
"but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:"
These two things are effectively the same.
Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with some parents who neglect him.
(Or any third-world country around the world; or even worse, a war ridden place).
How do you suggest he should prepare for this kind of opportunity?
I'm not detracting from his merit, but 99% of this outcome is due to being next door to Caltech and sympathetic to its faculty.
You don’t choose what you want, you choose what you can have.
Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.
As always, when working outside the system, it should be expected that semantics will be used against you, but if it's your interest, it needn't stop you nor need care about such unpersuasive arguments.
There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends -- in fact this might be even better for "science."
The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
That privilege may well be a necessary condition towards being able to publish a paper that shows extreme computational sophistication for a high schooler (and indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level paper). But it's certainly not a sufficient condition, as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve anything close to what Matteo accomplished.
The default narrative is "hard work and talent should be rewarded", but the reality is "hard work and talent are only rewarded in very unusual and strictly rationed circumstances, and most potential is wasted."
The waste is caused by unexamined political friction. There has to be a hierarchy of opportunity, because some kinds of people have to an easier time of it than other kinds of people.
American capitalism makes a lot of noise about social mobility but does almost everything it can to prevent it in practice.
Occasionally people still make it against the odds, but the point is the odds are there for most of the population. People who beat them rarely get the kind of media support this story offers.
These opportunities come to those who seek them.
Compared to Rest of US, never mind Rest of World, only a tiny percentage of twelve year olds had those two opportunities.
The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.
I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.
EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.
The kid in the article had a big brain to begin with, and there were ample buffs at his disposal, so he got to speed run his interest because he was lucky enough to be born in the right zip code. It doesn't diminish his work at all. (And it is also true that there are plenty of rich failsons and faildaughters who get slotted into birthright CEO positions without ever knowing adversity.)
I like Finland's approach: they have no private schools [1], which means rich kids go to the same public schools as poor kids (or their parents fly their kids out of the country). This means there is a much greater likelihood of advanced resources for smarter kids. But Finland also doesn't have the radical wealth disparity that we have in the US.
[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/world/finland-no-fee-paying-schools...